


I Was Lost for You to Find

by Frea_O



Series: Mine for Safekeeping [3]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: (References At Least), Accidental Baby Acquisition, F/F, Gen, Kid Fic, Past Child Abuse, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-01
Updated: 2018-01-01
Packaged: 2019-02-26 04:17:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13227906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Frea_O/pseuds/Frea_O
Summary: They’ve been in the future for eighteen months. It’s only natural some things would change in the meantime. Luckily, an old friend is there to catch them up.(Tony meets his Aunt Bobbi)





	I Was Lost for You to Find

**Author's Note:**

> Song, as ever, from _Everything Changes_ from _Waitress_. References Season 5 episode _Rewind_.

“The problem with stick figures,” Bobbi Morse said as she unloaded bags onto the hotel room bed, “is that they’re not very specific. So all I knew was Daisy-Jemma-baby but not age or gender. Luckily, _Star Wars_ is gender-neutral. Though I did get some strange looks from the cashier for buying such a range of outfits.”

“And so the nerd indoctrination begins,” Daisy said, holding up a little onesie that said ‘My Other Ride is an X-Wing.’

“Start ’em young.” Bobbi unloaded the last bag, pulling out a little rattle, which she handed to Daisy. She turned expectantly to Jemma, eyebrows high. “So? You two aren’t going to be the kind of moms that never let anybody hold their kid, are you?”

“Of course you can hold him,” Jemma said, laughing. It was less of an ordeal to transfer the baby over than it had been last night—for one thing, Tony, despite being up half the night fretting, was wide awake and gurgling away. And she was getting a crash course on how not to awkward and ungainly when holding him.

Bobbi took the baby with practiced ease, cooing and chirping at him. “Oh, he’s precious, you guys. You, sir, a _chunk_. A precious chunk. Look at those cheeks! Oh, my god, I could just eat you up.” She looked over at Daisy and Jemma. “I guess you’re not going to need the twelve-month sizes I bought for a while, huh, are you?”

“We think he’s about two weeks old, but he weighs in, like, the ninetieth percentile,” Daisy said. “We had plenty of time to look it up, as this little guy didn’t want anybody sleeping last night, did he?”

He truly hadn’t. Jemma had always felt that every human being could be rationed with, but that belief had nothing in the face of a baby ripped from his reality and put in a strange place with new people. Tony had cried whenever put in the bassinet. Holding him had reduced the tears to fussing. Walking with and singing to him had seemed to be the only thing that comforted him. And since neither she nor Daisy knew any lullabies—“They weren’t exactly that loving at St. Agnes, it was more ‘go to sleep or you won’t get supper tomorrow.’”—this had led to Jemma dozing while Daisy paced back and forth, singing Queen songs she’d probably learned from the cassette Coulson always kept in Lola.

Jemma had fallen asleep sometime during _Fat-Bottomed Girls_ , which wasn’t exactly lullaby-appropriate.

Jemma shook her head at that now and began to sort the miscellaneous items Bobbi had brought with her, steadfastly ignoring the slightly crumpled sketch drawn in a childish hand. Daisy had examined it and set it down for her to study, but Jemma wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to think about her having a baby with Daisy being some kind of prophecy. Not just yet. In the meantime, she sorted through the rest of the offerings.

“How’d you find us?” Daisy asked.

“Lance set up a proximity alert at the base,” Bobbi said. “We had a vague idea when you’d be back, but, you know, life goes on. And it’s not exactly a quick hop from Mozambique to get back here in time.”

“And it’s okay that you’re here with us?” Jemma asked. After all, Bobbi and Lance had been forced from the team under some dire circumstances.

Bobbi cooed at the baby, who regarded her like some kind of strange alien. “No smile for your Auntie Bobbi? That’s fine, we’ll work on it. And yeah, it’s completely fine. Those orders against us being SHIELD agents have been lifted.”

“ _How_?” Daisy asked.

“You were gone eighteen months. A lot’s happened.” Bobbi let Tony wrap his hand around one of her fingers, grinning with delight. “He’s so cute. He looks so serious.”

“He hasn’t smiled yet,” Daisy said.

“If he did, it would be gas,” Jemma told her.

“I think that’s a myth.”

“You two are cute, too,” Bobbi said. Both Jemma and Daisy wrinkled their noses at her, and Bobbi seemed to jolt, obviously remembering something. “Oh, right, and we cleared your name, Daisy. Talbot’s fine. Everybody knows it was an LMD that shot him.”

“What?”

“You were gone eighteen months,” Bobbi repeated. “Did you think we would really sit around and let the entire world drag your names through the mud?”

“No?” Daisy asked, warily. “But you did have Lance with you, so…”

Bobbi grimaced, as though to say that was a fair point. “It didn’t go perfectly. There might still be a warrant out for your arrest, but if you stay out of Georgia, you should be fine.”

“Gotcha,” Daisy said as Jemma asked, “Do you mean the state or the country?”

Bobbi thought about it. “Both?”

“Good old Hunter,” Daisy said with a laugh. “I have _missed_ you two.”

“So you knew we would be coming back?” Jemma asked.

Bobbi nodded over at the drawing, which finally made Jemma pick it up and look it over. The dark-haired stick figure with the brown eyes and the smile, that was clearly Daisy. And her own stick figure held Daisy’s hand. Between the two of them, on the ground, was a little baby with a black hair. But what she had assumed was just a blur of color in the corner behind them, she realized, was a childish rendition of the sign for their hotel. “Ah,” she said.

She couldn’t wait until science had advanced sufficiently as to explain Robin’s gift.

“Ideally, we would’ve been at the base waiting for you,” Bobbi said. “But then you wouldn’t have been at the hotel at all, so I should’ve known. And ooh. I’m going to pass him back to his mommies, as honorary auntieship means I don’t change diapers unless I have to.”

“I’ll handle it,” Jemma said. She picked out a onesie that said ‘I Am A Jedi Like My Aunt Before Me,’ and took care of the soiled diaper, listening with one ear as Bobbi caught Daisy up on everything that had happened while they’d been in the future. It appeared they hadn’t had much more fun in the current timeline than the SHIELD team had in 90 years in the future.

“What about you?” Bobbi asked, taking the baby again as Jemma moved over to the sink to start heating up a bottle of formula. “What the hell happened to all of you, that you come back with a baby? Who knocked up whom? And how?”

“Nothing like _that_ , gutter-brain,” Daisy said, looking oddly pink. “They engineer babies in the future.”

“So all the responsibility and none of the fun?” Bobbi asked, wiggling her eyebrows at Daisy.

Had the hotel room always been this warm? Jemma focused on measuring out the proper amount of powder into the bottle.

“Enough of _that_ line of questioning, Agent Morse,” Daisy said. “Tony wasn’t something either of us did. You know Caligula?”

“The Roman emperor?”

“It turns out even in crazy future times, history repeats itself. Our Caligula was a Kree named Kasius and he ran a little base on what was left of earth. Think feudal oppression levels of awful meets the Hunger Games. He was a real piece of work—and he liked keeping the prettiest people on the base as silent and deaf slaves. Bastard.”

Jemma focused carefully on the water temperature, listening to the way the water hit the sink. Her breathing remained steady—and perfectly, comfortingly loud—in her ears, as Daisy continued to list all of Kasius’ sins to an offended Bobbi.

“And there was also the inhuman slave trade going on, too,” Daisy said. “So that was a party.”

“No,” Bobbi said, her eyes wide. “He tried to trade you?”

“Yes. When he wasn’t busy putting me through gladiator death matches.”

“Seriously? Are you okay?”

“Simmons took a bigger hit than I did,” Daisy said, looking over. “But she insists she’s fine.”

“I am,” Jemma said. The scar from her right shoulder to the center of her chest was still an angry red—she’d checked in the shower—but it only ached a little. The tech Fitz had used to heal her had done its job, more or less.

Daisy gave her a dubious look now, as though she didn’t believe her.

“I’m hardly going to disrobe to prove it to you, so you’ll have to take my word for it.” She finished making up the bottle and handed it to Bobbi, taking a seat on the bed next to her friend. “We came so close to losing Daisy to slave traders. We would have, if Fitz hadn’t showed up.”

“Anyway, he did, so nothing to worry about. Things still went to hell in a handbasket the way they always do,” Daisy said. “We had to fight our way out of there and Fitz and Simmons magicked—”

“ _Scienced_ ,” Jemma said before she realized that didn’t sound any better.

“—something to get us back here. On the way out, we went through their baby-growing lab, and we spotted him.” Daisy nodded at Tony, who was suckling at the bottle, his little hands waving in the air. “And it was kind of obvious.”

“He looks a lot like you,” Bobbi said, nodding.

“Simmons ran the DNA results back at the base. What is it—fifty-three percent me, forty-seven percent you?” she asked.

“Thereabouts,” Jemma said. “We’ve already established that he has my nose.”

“You two are taking this rather well, all considering,” Bobbi said.

Daisy and Jemma exchanged a look. “Ever been in a room with like twenty copies of yourself?” Daisy asked.

“I—can’t say I’ve had the pleasure.”

“We came back from a mission to find that all of our friends had been replaced with LMDs. To get them out, we went into a computer simulation where Ward was still alive—”

“—and Fitz was evil—”

“—and upon escaping from that, we had to fight Dr. Radcliffe’s assistant who was now inhuman,” Jemma said, as Fitz’s journey was a long and thorny subject for her. “She set up an LMD of Daisy to kill Talbot, which mercifully appears to have failed.”

“And while we’re reeling from all of _that_ noise and we just want a slice of pie,” Daisy said, “we get sucked into the future. This is not even getting into the story of our friend Robbie, whose head turns into a flaming skull and whose car heals itself. So, like, on a scale of one to ten for weirdness? Tony is like a three.”

“You guys really need a nap,” Bobbi said.

“No kidding,” Daisy said.

“Well, I can help with that bit. We set up temporary housing for all of you while you get back on your feet. I imagine Lance is finished telling the others. We even got a car seat for the munchkin.”

Bobbi, of course, was all too happy to hold—and burp—Tony while Daisy and Jemma repacked all the baby supplies into the shopping bags, slotting their own meager possessions in among Tony’s things. That surely must be a metaphor for how their lives had changed in the past twenty-four hours, Jemma thought as she followed Bobbi to the lobby, where the others waited.

Lance immediately brightened, making grabby hand motions until Bobbi passed the baby over. “We’ll get you in Liverpool duds soon, mate,” he said, chucking Tony under the chin.

Of course, the baby began to wail (“Serves you right. Liverpool,” Fitz scoffed) and had to be rescued from “Uncle Lance.” Things settled somewhat after they were loaded in the SUVs Lance and Bobbi had brought, driving all the way to the other side of town. Daisy and Jemma, seated on either side of Tony’s car seat, didn’t speak a word until Bobbi pulled up into the driveway of an unassuming single-story brick home that she reassured them had all of the amenities they—and Tony—would need. 

Daisy unhooked Tony’s car seat and Jemma collected their bags, both of them following Bobbi up the front walk to the little home. They could see the others in the driveway next door, parceling out keys and heading to the homes on either side of them. A temporary landing pad, Jemma thought. So much had changed while they were in the future and, she glanced at Tony, so much was about to. But for now, the thought of even a temporary sanctuary filled her chest with a hope she hadn’t felt in what seemed like ages.

Daisy seemed to agree, for she paused on the front porch instead of following Bobbi inside. She gave Jemma a small smile. “Welcome home, I guess? For now, at least.”

Jemma smiled back. _For now_ didn’t matter. _Home_ did. Tony, as though he agreed with her, let out a soft coo as he was carried into the first real home he would ever know.


End file.
